{"id":751,"date":"2006-04-12T15:17:00","date_gmt":"2006-04-12T20:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lawrencem94.sg-host.com\/?p=751"},"modified":"2006-04-12T15:17:00","modified_gmt":"2006-04-12T20:17:00","slug":"single-focused-orts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/?p=751","title":{"rendered":"Single-Focused Orts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>* We still don&#8217;t have a diagnosis. It&#8217;s unsettling, we were first delayed from Monday to Tuesday, then on Tuesday to Thursday. It&#8217;s a little like someone you don&#8217;t know juggling with your soul &#038; the souls of those you love, waiting breathless and praying they don&#8217;t drop them. It&#8217;s a lot like sucking.<\/p>\n<p>* I am perfecting the click of my eyes into the 1,000-yard-stare. Sometimes I look right through people. <\/p>\n<p>* My most common reaction to things that would ordinarily send me screeching (and blogging) is succinctly captured in the form of two lines from an Eminem song: <\/p>\n<p>                 Screaming &#8220;I don&#8217;t give a fuck!&#8221;<br \/>                 with his windows down and his system up<\/p>\n<p>Because, in fact, I don&#8217;t give a fuck if the spot ran wrong or you want a schedule to start on Monday or you need a plan. My father has cancer. He told me yesterday it&#8217;s Stage IV. But that it didn&#8217;t mean anything, it only meant it&#8217;s in more than one place. Well, there&#8217;s no Stage V, no matter where you google. So. How do you know it&#8217;s Stage IV without a diagnosis of what the cancer is? Does this give you a glimpse of what the hamster wheel in my head looks like, the one I climb on and run at least every five minutes, the one I can&#8217;t shut off at night unless I take something to sleep? The one that spins the tears and the hope and the futility and the helplessness? The hamster wheel I cannot leave, until I have more information, I cannot separate it from my head or my heart, I cannot turn it off, I cannot let go because it is sometimes the only thing that keeps me going, when I want to collapse in a heap, when I want the one person who could fix everything when I was a kid to give me answers he doesn&#8217;t have.  <\/p>\n<p>* Do the right thing. This has been a common theme on the hamster wheel. To go home now, to wait. To respect my father&#8217;s needs &#038; wishes, to care for my own as well. (He is already exhausted by the people &#038; family there non-stop streaming into his home &#038; through the phone.)  None of these can truly be answered until we know what we&#8217;re dealing with. I know my presence would be a drain, it would also be a benefit. Being the only child is an enormous trump card that bears great responsibility and great wagering.  The only thing I&#8217;ve done is start to knit him a pair of socks. <\/p>\n<p>*Breakdowns are becoming a daily way of life. A junior AE tried to set up an interview for our department intern &#038; called me on the phone to see if I would be available. I burst into tears. This is my new way of telling people what is going on, it seems to be working. At least it&#8217;s effectively communicating &#8220;GIRL IS CRAZY&#8221;. Which in the end, is what I want to leave people with. Ayup.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s all I&#8217;ve got. It&#8217;s an effective snapshot of pretty much every ten minutes in my head. If only my hamster wheel were a good fat-burning device, instead of a crazy-sobbing hope-despair track to nowhere.  I&#8217;m getting there fast, that&#8217;s for sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>* We still don&#8217;t have a diagnosis. It&#8217;s unsettling, we were first delayed from Monday to Tuesday, then on Tuesday to Thursday. It&#8217;s a little like someone you don&#8217;t know juggling with your soul &#038; the souls of those you love, waiting breathless and praying they don&#8217;t drop them. It&#8217;s a lot like sucking. * [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}